By TheCalgaryGuy - Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Last weekend Vero and Sandra convinced me to go see the movie Rent with them. Damn my weakness for movie popcorn!
It didn't seem that bad a movie, though I felt it was more of a rental. But with promises of popcorn and a good time, I folded like a nervous twenty-something showing a pair of twos. Experience teaches us both to listen to our instincts more closely.
So Rent is a Broadway musical moved to film. I'm a little curious to see the musical, wondering if it perhaps conveys the message better than the movie. I mean, there I saw a movie whose point completely eluded me well past the credits. Ok, it's cute and they sing and they dance and what am I supposed to understand from this?
I guess it's a problem with me: I expect something so all-encompassing as putting a musical play together to be such the undertaking that only the very best actually make it. I think I'm learning that such a complicated effort as getting a play ready for audiences thins out the options so much that anything that can actually be completed is showed, regardless of how good it is, simply because there isn't enough choice. Maybe I missed the point. And truthfully I ask you: who cares?
What was the point? Oh: Rent. You would think the title alone would be enough to tell you what to do with this movie, but in case it didn't here's what I say: rent it. If you're into Broadway musicals turned movies, that is. If you saw Chicago and loved the movie, don't get your hopes up -- it's nowhere near as good. If you like musicals because they sing and dance and everybody seems to take it as normal behavior, then Rent is an option (although I recommend the Buffy episode Once More with Feeling instead). Rent is cute and kinda fun, though it did seem to go on for ever...
By TheCalgaryGuy - Friday, November 25, 2005
For those of y'all that run Windows, here's an interesting test you can quickly go through.
Create a folder on your desktop called "notepad" (no quotes, obviously). Start Internet Explorer. Right-click in it and select "View Source". Be amazed.
It seems to work for whatever page you're on (I tested a couple of different ones). It also works if you use the "View" menu and "Source" option.
Is that a bug or an undocumented feature? Only time will tell. If it cares, that is.
I have no idea how you could do it, but that could be a way to "protect" your site's source... Hum...
By TheCalgaryGuy - Tuesday, November 22, 2005
It's a clear blue sky day, the sun is shining and we just hit 20 degrees. That does it: I'm going outside and taking a walk. Maybe even take the bike out.
By TheCalgaryGuy - Monday, November 21, 2005
Today is the 33rd annual World Hello Day, a day where everyone should greet ten people during the day as a means to open communications and express concern for world peace.
The web site is pretty basic, but then again so is the idea. Check them out at http://www.worldhelloday.org. This is a neat idea, even if it only means that people will talk more (and not actually bring about world peace but, as they say, you'll never know if you don't try).
The coder in me can't help but think these guys registered to the "introduction to programming" class in university...
So I say onto all of you, on this most special of days: hello!
(Note: for them in y'all that didn't get the programming joke, the most basic piece of code that serves as the typical example usually is one that displays "Hello World!", known in the coding circles as the "hello world" example.)
By TheCalgaryGuy - Friday, November 18, 2005
It's Friday. Ah, Friday. The Day of the Fri. The day of the Friar? Nah. The day of the Fry? Hum... fries...
By TheCalgaryGuy - Thursday, November 17, 2005
For those of you who have to deal with other people's code, you must make The Daily WTF a routine stop.
If you don't deal with any code at all, you can safely ignore this link and bask in the ignorant bliss of the programming-illiterate. I almost envy you.
The Daily WTF is this site where this guy posts, daily, code pieces sent to him by people around the world. It contains the ugliest, scariest, most complicated code you can think of, code that people have to deal with every day. It's great!
You think your project is overly complex? You haven't seen anything until you read these stories...
By TheCalgaryGuy - Wednesday, November 16, 2005
So I had Monday off. I got up late, sat in front of my computer for a little while then thought better of it and walked away. It was a cold day outside and I didn't feel brave enough to test it, so I pulled out a movie.
Actually, I pulled out three. I watched the Matrix trilogy. Seven and a half hours of Keanu Reeves. This was the first time I watched all three movies in such a short period.
I can't say it's any better as one big story. It's not bad, I like it a lot, but you still have those "huh?" moments where the story gets a little weaker. Being told the whole story in one shot doesn't make things any clearer.
Still, I had a blast. Started at 11AM, ended at 6:30PM, stereo blasting and eating too much junk. It was a lot of fun and I recommend it to anyone that owns the movies.
The only thing I didn't watch is the Animatrix pieces that bridge the gap between the first two movies. There's a pretty big gap there, but you just roll with it and it's quickly forgotten.
By TheCalgaryGuy - Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Last week was a great week to get stuff! I got a bunch, all of which were extremely cool and all of which I tried over the weekend.
First, Vero got us some Yaktrax thingnies, an ingenious little device you strap under your boots to provide traction on hard snow and ice. I wasn't convinced when I saw it -- how can little rings help that much, shouldn't we have spikes? -- but after trying it in a frozen Johnston Canyon I can confidently say: GET SOME OF THOSE! Holy cow. We walked on ICE as if it wasn't there. We climbed hills past people in running shoes that were barely standing up. Everybody looked at us with that jealous look of "now THAT's not fair". It was great!
I also received about three year's worth of birthday and Christmas gifts from Marianne, in a neat little ThinkGeek package. This stuff is the coolest. First off, all geeks MUST get the LED Binary Clock. I can't keep my eyes off it, I'm always looking for a pattern. Great fun.
For the more mobile geeks in us, I got a bunch of t-shirts too. Binary people, there's no place like home, you are here, generic humanoid carbon unit and Joss Whedon is my master now. Vero has that face of "God save me, I'm gonna marry a geek" when I put one on. They're great! If you're looking for a birthday gift for Vero, I suggest this one.
So it's with a geek shirt and an eye on a binary clock that I (sadly) return to work after a great long weekend.
By TheCalgaryGuy - Thursday, November 10, 2005
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day, a statutory holiday throughout all of Canada except Ontario and Québec. And since I'm not in Québec anymore...
So tomorrow we are off to the mountains, do some hiking. No plans yet. But the time off work will help everyone.
While I'm at it, I have some overtime accumulated and, with my company's "time off in lieu" policy, I decided to take Monday off as well. Yay for the long weekend!
I'm not sure if I'll be updating the site during that time. I might just find something to do that completely prevents me from even looking at a computer screen. That might be good.
By TheCalgaryGuy - Wednesday, November 9, 2005
I watched Jet Li's Unleashed last night. It's another one of those movies that Vero didn't want to see, so as she went to get a hair cut I watched AN ENTIRE MOVIE, INCLUDING SPECIAL FEATURES! I even had time to spare. I tell ya, it's complicated being a woman...
To be fair to Vero's hair adventure, the special features sucked and her hair color looks good. Special features are one behind the scene and a couple of attitude-blaring music videos. Bah.
The movie has a weird feel. Jet Li is very good at playing this confused guy with the mental and social skills of a kid, but some parts of the story just feel odd. It's like the characters have a vibe that's completely off, like they don't belong together. Then again, that's part of the story too, that they don't really belong together. It's hard to put into words, but it was a weird feeling.
The action is quite rough. Vero didn't want to see the movie because she thought it was too tough for her delicate sensibilities, and heck she was right. Not a whole lot of blood or deaths or body parts ripped off, yet a very nasty look to all fights.
I was surprised when I saw Luc Besson's name come up as the writer, at the beginning of the movie. I didn't expect that. But it didn't have that spectacular humph I've come to expect from him. I guess the idea was to make a very nasty and violent movie and, well, they did.
It's definitely not a movie I recommend your kids watch, but if you're a fan of Jet Li and action movies this one is worth seeing once. It's a different kind of action movie and it's entertaining in it's own, different way.
By TheCalgaryGuy - Tuesday, November 8, 2005
So I have this theory. It's not much, doesn't really stand up to any kind of arguments, but it's fun, simple and kinda makes sense. And heck, you can always use it as an excuse to stop fantasizing and just get on with it already.
Let's start with the basic multiple-universes-by-decision tree. I just made up that name, I have no idea what it's called. The idea -- and I make it very basic here because I'm no expert on the subject and we have better things to do than research this stuff -- I like to explain this way:
Think of your life as a line. From birth to death, a straight line. On that line, your life happens. Here you have a birthday, there you buy a house, somewhere else you live happily ever after. Now consider this: every moment of our lives we are confronted with choices and we make decisions. The decisions we make are what creates this line. But in parallel universes, you pick different options. So each decision point on your line is a point where a number of different "life lines" emerge, giving it the look of branches on a tree. On each line come multiple decision points that each branch off with their own option. Soon, you have a pretty large tree; one "branch" of that tree is your life, the other branches are parallel universes. In most universes life is the same, you just have a silver car instead of a black one. In some universes, wars rage because something you did (or didn't do) had that kind of "butterfly effect". You get the picture.
So the idea, to summarize it, is that every decision you make spawns a parallel universe in which things happens just a little differently. And here's where I make the big jump: the chain of events is such that only specific events can happen from a decision, whereas all other events are constrained to other universes. Does that even make sense? Ok, here's a completely fictional example that I never thought of before: you drive down the street in your silver car right by a woman that completely fails to notice you. In a parallel universe, the one in which you got the black car, you drive down the same street and your car catches her eye, you meet, talk, fall in love, get married, have kids and live happily ever after. Having a silver car means there is no way you can meet her (at least, not at that point in time).
Oy, am I getting deep in there. I'm trying to explain it in a way that makes some sense. Hope it's working. And keep remembering: this is just for fun, so stop trying to prove that it's completely impossible...
Now for the fun part.
Consider, just consider, that all this stuff is true: making a decision influences what will happen (duh) and what has the possibility of happening. Now consider this: what if your imagination is an integral part of the universe and thinking about making a decision is just as valid as actually making it?
It would mean that every time you imagine a situation, and imagine the decision you would make, you create a point on your life line from which all other decisions depend. Since a decision point affects what has the possibility of happening, a bunch of possible outcomes have just been moved from your universe into some parallel ones, just outside of your reach.
In other words, when you sit there and think of that cute guy you like and picture yourself walking up to him, engaging in conversation and saying exactly the right thing (and, of course, I'm talking about someone else... I would never walk up to a cute guy, obviously) what ends up happening is that his answers and the conversation that follows get split off into a parallel universe, just because of your thinking about it, and makes the whole thing impossible to actually happen.
Which is why, after having thought of walking up to the cute guy and having a thousand different perfect conversations, you walk up to him and say the absolute stupidest thing. You have no choice! That is the only option left in your universe, all the good lines have been "moved" to parallel ones!
So there. That's my theory on why you should just stop day dreaming about stuff and go and do them already. Because the more you think about how it could happen, the less likely it is to happen that way.
That, or start day dreaming about the thousand different ways you could look completely stupid. Maybe all that will be left will be the perfect conversation, who knows. I personally never tried it, so let me know of your experiences...
By TheCalgaryGuy - Monday, November 7, 2005
Yes, I finally saw Batman Begins this weekend. Vero absolutely did not want to see it, and before I realized it was out of theaters, so when she left me by my lonesome on Saturday to go hang out with the girls, I took the opportunity to rent the movie.
I have to go along with the majority on that one: it was much better than I expected, much better than the previous films. The story had that darkness we expect from the Dark Knight, yet has humour and a very nice storyline. I think I missed a lot from not seeing it on the big screen 'cause Scarecrow wasn't that scary. And every time I saw Katie Holmes I couldn't help wondering if Tom Cruise was behind the camera keeping an evil eye on Bale. All and all, it was a fun time and I was quite entertained.
So my rating for the movie: I won't buy the DVD, but I do recommend you rent it. And after seeing it, I think Vero wouldn't have had a problem watching the movie.
By TheCalgaryGuy - Friday, November 4, 2005
I try not to post twice in a day, but this is too good. Steve, of Barenaked Ladies, posted this link on the band's blog: http://www.vgmerchandise.com/misc.html.
Read it, be scared, be amazed, wonder how you can make that kind of cash the same way too.
Have you read it yet? No? Go read it 'cause I want to talk about it now.
Done? Good.
I can't say I know who Vincent Gallo is. Maybe I'm too young, am not enough American or English or have enough general culture, I don't know. For all I know, this guy's a nobody or a has-been. Regardless of who you are, it takes some serious cohonas to post something like that (though, according to the text, the man does have the balls for it). And there's this "bloody accident on the highway" part of my curiosity that wonders if it will actually work.
My favorite part, I have to admit, is this:
If the purchaser [...] chooses the option of natural insemination, there is an additional charge[...]. However, if after being presented detailed photographs of the purchaser, Mr. Gallo may be willing to waive the natural insemination fee [...].
Now there is a precedent for socially inept men: buy at a cheap price, but if you're good looking I might just do it for free. Kinda like prostitution, except backwards.
I came up on this site yesterday while checking out some podcasts: Technorati Search. It's a search engine for blogs. No big deal, but what's really cool (for blog writers, at least) is that you can search for blogs that refer to a link. In the "website URL search" section, type in the URL of your blog and bam! you get a list of everyone that refered to you. Pretty neat.
They already index the major blog sites, like MSN Spaces and Blogger, but you can also have them "ping" your site to get it indexed. All you have to do, it seems, is add a couple of tags in your page. Since I'm hosting my blog (instead of using a service), I'm not automatically indexed and I haven't tried adding their tags, but it seems simple enough.
If you have a blog, that site is worth checking out. If only for the fun factor of the first ten minutes.
By TheCalgaryGuy - Thursday, November 3, 2005
Now that is some serious blues. And you know it's serious blues when the second verse starts with:
"She's 3 times 7, that makes 21"
Oh yeah. Just don't ask me what that means, I'm too busy grooving.
(I'm listening to the Roadhouse podcast, "the best blues you've never heard".)
By TheCalgaryGuy - Wednesday, November 2, 2005
We had our first overnight snow today. It started snowing late last night and this morning we had a solid inch everywhere!
I know I said I wouldn't talk of the weather as much, but when you walk out of the basement and come face to face with the biggest, cutest bunny you ever saw... how can you just resist that, huh? I swear that thing was bigger than Mr. Electrifying's purse dogs...
As the sun was rising, the small valey down from our house created this dense fog that covered everything... Even the electrical poles were lost in it! But we can still see the mountains, and that's what it's all about.
In this picture, we get an even better idea of how much snow there was. And with the sun rising, it makes for this great scene.
The sun has been out all morning now. It's a little past 1PM and already the streets are clear, as well as most of the roof facing south. I think the snow will be completely gone by the end of the day. This morning was just a quick preview of what is to come in the next months.
By TheCalgaryGuy - Tuesday, November 1, 2005
The Barenaked Ladies are touring between now and the end of the year, coming to Calgary on December 19th. We will be there, in the first balcony, row J. Got the tickets as soon as they came on sale.
Today, I checked to make sure BNL didn't release a new album I hadn't heard about. They didn't. But I did come across the group's blog where they mention that they are currently recording a ton of songs for the next album, which we can only hope will be out early next year. The blog is quite the interesting read; I'll see how often it is maintained and just might make it a part of my daily reading...
And so I've been listening to a random of all BNL songs I own since the weekend. It kinda scares Vero that I can sing every single word...
